and stranger ambulatory plants. I seemed to settle down
into the jungle, to become a part of it, though the moment
I wished to go on I ceased this empathy and rose until I
stood above it, looking down on it—and looking out on
the millions of other scenes awaiting me on the flat black
table of nothingness.
I set out, searching for the core of God, for the shat-
tered glass that held Him.
He could not be far.
Wasn’t God everywhere?
I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was
as thick as water reeds with boles as large around as two
men could link their arms. The leaves were high overhead
and did not allow even a minim of sunshine through.
I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was
carpeted with an explosion of ripe colors, where clouds of
spores rose and swept by me as their season came, where
seeds stuck to my analogue body from the sappy tendrils
of man-sized milkweed plants.
I saw a red sky with a blue sun, and the land was
parched and empty beneath both.
Twice as I wandered, I felt His onrushing presence, the
huge power of His disabled mind. I reached out, grasping
blindly for Him, but He was gone in the instant, leaving
me groping and frustrated.
Several times, the sky itself came screaming down,
compressing the air beneath it until my analogue body
threatened to explode. The sky shattered around me, was
resurrected as flocks of blue-white birds, and rose again
to hang high over everything.
The earth rose and fell like a beating breast, the vibra-
tions of the heart muscle coursing through me.
There were creatures with many eyes, others with more
legs than I could count.
Dead birds fell from the sky by the tens of thousands,
became lizards when they struck the earth, climbed the
rocks about me, grew wings, and entered the clouds again.
There were places where the trees wailed and broke
open with ugly sores, bled as if they were made of flesh.
The dripping blood became crimson pebbles where the
tree touched the earth.
I stalked through this chaos, searching.
At last, I came upon Him where He was desperately
trying to coalesce into an analogue form with which He
could contact me. He was a smoky, bluish pillar of psychic
energy, roiling, tumbling, spitting sparks of many colors,
at last jelling into the shape of a man: Buddha.
“It is a wise man who knows how to compromise,”
Buddha said, rubbing His large bare belly and smiling
down at me. He towered twenty feet into the air.
“I will not compromise,” I said.
“The seven lives——”
I pushed on. “I will not compromise.” I extended fingers
of my own psychic energy, and felt out the core of God,
seeking for the pattern to its structure.
The figure shifted, became an image of Jesus Christ.
“Truly, I say unto you, a man who recognizes his own
mortality is a happier man. A man who comes to live with
his weakness with all humility is a man destined for my
kingdom.”
I grasped Jesus’ neck with psychic hands and throttled
Him.
He exploded, whirled into a column of energy, a furi-
ous, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but
could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to har-
ness and control it, and His mechanism had long ago
deteriorated beyond the point of effectiveness. God was a
hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipu-
latory system: a car without wheels.
I reached with my own mental tendrils, and oblivious to
the halfhearted and misdirected weapons He brought to
bear against me, also oblivious of His pitiful pleading, I
threaded him. He wanted to maintain His power, even
though He was insane, and I could not make Him under-
stand that it was time for a new God.
He wriggled and twisted in a vain attempt to pull free
of me.
As I encircled Him, I knew that God had been insane
long before Child had ever approached Him, had been a
raving and incoherent mass of energy for—perhaps—
millennia. All mankind’s faiths had failed to understand